We say that ‘seeing is believing’, but it isn’t. In a long
tradition, many films and dramas use the theme of different witnesses’
interpretations of the same event, sometimes called the ‘Rashomon effect’ after
Kurosawa’s film of that name. Vantage Point (2008) directed by Pete Travis, is
a good example. Here the assassination of a US president is seen from seven
different perspectives, progressively unravelling the real nature of the event.
The film literally winds back the action again and again for each witness
account to be shown, all restarting from the same departure point.
This is a convincing angle on the limited quality of virtual
experience as opposed to ‘real’ experience. Such limited and limiting
perception is becoming an increasingly common feature of social activities
almost universally. It’s all too common nowadays to see tourists arrive in some
monumental and significant place and, instead of using their eyes to see,
immediately lift their cameras or iPads to record what is before them. The true
visual experience is lost. Here again, as McGilchrist puts it ‘the subtle cues
of real-life environments ….’ are left out of the act of perception.
But, as we see all around us, the unthinking (unseeing?)
activities of tourists pale beside the daily obsession with smartphones that we
find in groups of youngsters. Connected as they are digitally, they barely need
to look up and absorb the presence of their friends around them.
In a related comment from another angle, the writer MarioVargas Llosa, in an interview with Antonio Caño, the director of the Spanish
newspaper El País, goes so far as to say that ‘if the world continues the
process which leads to the written word being replaced by the image and the
audiovisual, we run the risk that freedom, the capacity to reflect and imagine
will disappear along with other institutions like democracy.’
“Si el mundo sigue el proceso en el que la palabra
escrita es reemplazada por la imagen y lo audiovisual, se corre el riesgo de
que desaparezca la libertad, la capacidad de reflexionar e imaginar y otras
instituciones como la democracia”, advirtió ayer Mario Vargas Llosa en
conversación con Antonio Caño, director de EL PAÍS.
He considers that ‘the word that is read, language that is
communicated through print, has an effect in the brain which complements and
completes what is read.’ He goes on, ‘images don’t produce the same mechanism
of transformation. In reading, there is a creative and intellectual effort
which is barely present in the visual.’
This statement may seem to deny the great visual arts their
power, but clearly this isn’t what Vargas Llosa is referring to. Along with the
poverty of the smartphone event, often goes low quality of the visual or audio
material, inviting no creative effort at all.
We come back to the quality of true perception as opposed to
vision, remembering William Blake. ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a
wise man sees.’ The poet sees with an eye that captures multidimensional
layers of experience, just as a gifted visual artist does. Such direct forms of
knowledge, for that is what it is, namely ‘knowing’ the object, are
irreproducible except through the channels that allow them to come alive again
in the perception of another person. As T S Eliot summed it up, there is the
event of seeing, the event of writing the poem about what is seen, and the
event of the reader recreating what was seen in their own mind.
In such a refined event of reading and recreating come together the
‘creative and intellectual effort’ of which Vargas Llosa speaks, and ‘the
subtle cues of real-life environments’ held up by McGilchrist.
Young people need the full range of such experiences to allow
their emotional and intellectual lives to flourish. In which case they will
become more and more sensitive to the profound difference between seeing and
believing.
CJM 4/2015
